


Ce que vous voudres

by Lilliburlero



Category: 14th Century CE RPF
Genre: Daddy Issues, Gen, John of Gaunt Is A Shitehawk, Male Homosociality, Tournaments, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:37:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1736486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your Dad's jokes are always embarrassing.  But John of Gaunt's jokes are <i>really</i> embarrassing, and have the potential to get you killed in quite embarrassingly futile ways.</p><p>* </p><p>Content advisory: strong, misogynistic language of the tournament shit-talking class.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ce que vous voudres

**Author's Note:**

> for strangeparticles, to the prompt 'Henry Bolingbroke, Anagapesis'. 
> 
> Anagapesis: the feeling of no longer loving someone.

Unpopular.  Henry sounded the word: it rang like an adze chipping into an old beam and meeting a buried nail. He could name the note, as he could name any played or sung to him; likewise, he needed no guide from pipe or string to begin playing or singing in key. He was nine or ten years old before he realised that wasn’t something everyone could do.  He had assumed other people were just lazy.  Mary couldn’t do it, and she was a better musician than he, subtler, more flexible.  She had a little resonant iron to regulate the pitch of her singing; his gift to her.   

Unpopular. It’s a chronicler’s word, a sympathetic chronicler’s word: or at least, not _un_ sympathetic. The man to whom he owed all devotion, all love, all duty was _unpopular_ : for his un-English birth, his arrogance, his bad luck in war, his tendency to surround himself with people as little liked as he, his slaking of carnal lusts on those of low degree and his elevation of them to his acknowledged favour. 

In fact, John, Duke of Lancaster, was _loathed_.  Henry had  known this at least since he reached the age of discretion, though John’s detractors would not have spoken ill of him in front of his dutiful, learned, pious eldest son, who was considered the best tournament fighter in England, perhaps beyond.  If someone were to ask Henry what he felt for his father, he might cite the Fourth Commandment, or he might knock him down.  Actually, he would probably knock him down while citing the Fourth Commandment.  Because Henry did not like John any more than anyone else did.  He remembered the moment at which he owned it to himself; the damning realisation the more horrific because of the trifle which provoked it.  

It was at the great tournament at St Inglevert.  Jean le Maingre, called Boucicaut, and two other knights whose fame was nearly as great, set up their pavilions in that bosky spot and challenged all gentlemanly comers to five courses against them.

Henry’s capacity for veneration was always large.  But at twenty-two years of age it was vast, total, all-consuming.  He adored Boucicaut with something perilously close to a breach of the _Second_ Commandment.  The Frenchman’s nature was affable and generous enough to accept the adulation with a grace that put Henry at his ease; Boucicaut held himself in high regard, indeed, but not vainly.  Nor was he insensible of the reputation of his challenger and new friend: he liked Henry’s looks, which were a great deal better than their possessor ever acknowledged, his scholarly intelligence, his enthusiasm for feats of arms.  Boucicaut entertained Henry, sometimes with his followers, sometimes _à deux_ , day after day in his pavilion, which was of red silk, dizzingly emblazoned round and round with his personal motto _ce que vous voudres_.  Both men would privily rather have liked to act upon the instruction to the emphatic extent proposed by the decor, but their shared modesty obtruded.  

Two days before their joust they dined and drank together; the stern nature of neither young man admitted gluttony, but perhaps they were both tipsy when Boucicaut untucked a letter from his doublet lining.

‘Here’s a good laugh, my dear.  You’ll never guess who this is from.’

He did not bother to cover the seal.

‘Haven’t a notion,’  Henry said lightly, but his smile was stiff, his blood chilled thick and it felt like his liver had just hit his boots. 

‘See if you recognise the prose style.’

Boucicaut started to read, a laborious, jocose exhortation to learn that pup of Hereford a lesson or two in chivalry by going ten courses with him instead of five.  It was illiterate—had the old man got a new secretary, one who hadn’t worked up the nerve to correct the Duke of Lancaster’s appalling grammar? Or, worse still, had he written it _himself_?  Henry craned for a glimpse of the hand—Boucicaut swatted him away with an affectionate governessy tut, the sort of horseplay he usually rather enjoyed.  It seemed to go on for all eternity.  It was humilitating.  It was insupportable.  It was mortifying.  It was his father, _trying to be funny_. 

There was nothing to do but sit it out, arrange his features as best he could into sporting good humour.  Boucicaut looked up with a frank grin.

‘Oh— _not_ amused?’ 

‘It’s all right.  The bloody old buffer only means to tease. It’s just not _quite_ so excruciatingly hilarious when you’ve had to put up with it as long as you can remember.’ 

‘Mmm.  I always wished I'd known my papa.  He died when I was two.’  Boucicaut grimaced wryly.  ‘Maybe there are advantages to being an orphan.  The thing is, we haven’t any choice, have we?’

Henry shook his head, set his jaw and growled,  ‘I’ll spit you like a sucking pig, you ugly fucker.’

‘Not if I fucking get there first, you whoreson cunt.’

They laughed and embraced and kissed.  And the following Monday they went the ten strokes; their ferocity an index of their mutual love and esteem. Spent and swooning, they laughed, and embraced and kissed again, and showered each other in high praise.  At the end of the tournament, Boucicaut invited Henry to join him on the Duke of Bourbon’s crusade to Tunis.  It should have been glory and triumph and pride too achingly sweet to support, but all he could think of were his friend’s words: _maybe there are advantages to being an orphan_. 

Unpopular.  He’d think of St Inglevert again, ten years later, as an exile in a borrowed house in Paris, with another letter in his hands.  Henry ever suppressed much in himself, failed to acknowledge his feelings until it was too late, and then became consumed by turbid emotion. He did not lie to himself.  He had not liked his father. His sorrow for the man, for John, called _of Gaunt_ , was only too containable.  But his grief for _Lancaster_ was unrestrained and unassuagable, the defences were in fragments, and he would see all England drown before he would let the dolorous flood recede.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of the detail here is taken from Ian Mortimer's biography of Henry IV, but nothing as grandiose as historical accuracy is intended.
> 
> The idea that Henry had absolute pitch is my own invention, and actually probably contradicted by his account books, in which appears the purchase of a recorder (i.e. a tuning instrument), apparently for his own use. Mary de Bohun's tuning fork is, however, historical.
> 
> I got my hints for Jean le Maingre's possible taste in interior decoration from his [Book of Hours](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boucicaut_Master).


End file.
